17

When Eddie Mallon reached the corner of Onslow Drive and Whitehill Street he saw Senga standing barefoot outside her house in a dark green robe with short sleeves. Her hair was in some disarray. Eddie walked towards her, thinking how she looked pale and depleted. She turned her face when she heard him.

‘You’re up bright and early,’ he said.

‘I woke at dawn and I couldn’t go back to sleep again, so I stepped outside and lo and behold here I am.’

‘You’re not wearing anything on your feet.’

‘I like the ground against my skin,’ she said. ‘As a wee girl I loved to go barefoot every chance I got.’ She looked at Eddie sadly. ‘I have this cringe-making memory of forcing you to dance last night. I’m sorry about that. It was lunatic behaviour.’

‘There’s nothing to apologize for.’

She took a packet of B&H from the pocket of her robe, removed a cigarette and lit it with a gold lighter. She squinted her eyes against the smoke and looked at Eddie carefully for a moment. ‘So … do I measure up to Flora?’

The question surprised him. ‘I never thought of comparing you and her.’

‘Apples and pears, eh?’

‘You made Jackie happy.’

‘It was hard work at times.’

‘He wasn’t happy with Flora,’ Eddie said. He wondered if this remark constituted a tiny betrayal of his mother.

‘Oh, I know all about that old soap opera,’ Senga said. ‘How to use your weans as pawns in a stupid game. Jackie realized it was stupid and destructive, but he could be inflexible beyond belief at times. Breaking a family up – for what?’ Senga hesitated a second. ‘He used to agonize over what he’d done. One day I told him, look, Jackie, if it’s eating your heart out as much as you say, why don’t you write to Eddie? Why don’t you tell him how you feel?’

‘You were behind that? I didn’t know. I’m glad you did it.’

‘Somebody had to kick his arse. I helped him write that first letter. And when you replied, he was over the moon. You’d opened the door for him a little way. A belated chance at redemption. You hadn’t condemned him. You should have seen how happy he was after he made the first phone call and heard your voice.’

‘I always wanted him to meet my wife and son,’ Eddie said.

‘It just wasn’t on the cards.’ Senga rubbed her eyelids. ‘You want my honest opinion? Your mother was as much to blame as Jackie. She should’ve scratched and clawed to keep her kids together, but no, off she went to America with her tail between her legs. And don’t tell me it was because Jackie frightened her, because if it had been me I would’ve moved bloody heaven and earth to keep my kids.’ She puffed her cigarette quickly. Her words were expelled in little spurts of smoke. ‘Flora chickened out, no argument. Jackie behaved like a major prick. And you and your sister were the ones that paid the price.’

Eddie thought of Flora immersed in her world of plants and big-band music. Her lifelong loneliness. Senga was right. Flora hadn’t fought for her kids. She’d talked and talked about saving money for a lawyer, and how Joyce would be rescued and brought to America, but it was vapour, and it blew away. Maybe Joyce wouldn’t have wanted to leave Scotland in any event. Had anyone ever asked her? Dysfunctional, Eddie thought. A family broken down and hissing steam like an old truck at the side of the road.

Senga folded her arms under her breasts. ‘The neighbours probably think I’m completely daft standing out here like this. They think I’m eccentric as it is.’ She looked down, wiggled her toes. ‘Want some coffee?’

‘Sure.’ He found himself liking her, the way she shot from the hip, the apparent good sense she made when she talked about the Jackie-Flora saga. He glimpsed what Jackie must have seen in her, somebody straight, no hidden angles. What you see is what you get.

He followed her inside the house and walked behind her into the kitchen. This room had been redecorated since he’d last seen it – new stainless-steel appliances, recessed spotlights in the ceiling where a solitary bulb used to hang from a long flex.

‘Pull up a chair, Eddie,’ she said.

Senga was the kind of woman you found yourself obeying. She emitted, even in her grief, a sense of power and determination, as if heartbreak was something you could overcome if you worked hard at it. You got out of bed in the morning and kept on going, no matter what. She set cups and saucers on the table. He declined milk and sugar; he wanted his caffeine in an unadulterated rush.

He said, ‘I walked down to the warehouse.’

‘Was anyone there?’

‘Joe Wilkie.’

‘He’s loyal,’ she said. ‘I like Joe. I like his boy Ray.’

‘Joe hates the idea of the place being sold.’

‘Jackie was always talking about selling,’ she said. ‘He blew hot and cold on the idea. But he couldn’t have sold without my consent, because I own fifty per cent of the place.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘We’d been partners for more than ten years, Eddie. I invested a little cash of my own at one point when he was going through hard times, and in return I got half the company.’ She stared at Eddie with a certain air of mock defiance. ‘It’s only a bloody scrapyard, Eddie, when you get right down to it. Okay, sometimes we get some decent stuff passing through, but not often. If I was a gold-digger, believe me, I wouldn’t have taken up with your dad. In any case, I’ve got better business sense than Jackie ever had. I’m not just a pretty face.’

Eddie smiled. Partner in life, partner in business. What else didn’t he know about the relationship between Jackie and Senga? For the first time since Jackie’s murder, he considered the bureaucracy of death, a last will and testament, ledgers, files, bank accounts, unpaid taxes – all the stuff of life that the dead leave behind.

‘Did Jackie make a will?’ he asked.

‘Damn right. I insisted on it. He left this house to me and his half of the business to your sister. I can’t see Joyce wanting a half-share in the yard, so I’ll cash her out if we can come to an agreement. We’ll discuss it some time.’

Eddie was quiet a moment. ‘Wilkie thought Jackie had found a potential buyer, a man called Haggs.’

‘Skinnymalinky?’

‘Who?’

‘That’s my name for Roddy Haggs. A long drip of a guy. His hands are always dead cold. He’s like something dug up from the frost. It doesn’t help that he looks a wee bit like Count Dracula on a bad day.’

‘Tell me more about him.’

‘He’s one of those flash characters with his grubby fingers into everything going. A thug, but a rich one. Jackie pretended to like him, but he didn’t trust him. I think maybe they did some business together a long time ago but they never got along. I met Haggs five or six times, usually if I was out having a drink with Jackie. He’d always shake my hand and hold it a wee bit longer than necessary. It was like he wanted to flirt with me right under Jackie’s nose.’

‘He wanted to think he could upset Jackie,’ Eddie suggested.

‘Worth a try.’ Senga was overwhelmed a moment by an apparently sad thought, and she frowned, plucked a tissue from a box on the table and blew her nose. ‘I’ll tell you something that’s bothering me. Where the hell is Bones? He was never far away from Jackie. Why hasn’t he come round to offer his condolences? It’s not his style. He was Jackie’s shadow.’ She smoked a cigarette and stared into the lit end. Her eyes watered.

‘Have you any idea why he might have vanished?’

‘Chris Caskie asked me that same question last night. I don’t know, maybe something bad has happened to him.’

‘Don’t jump to gloomy conclusions,’ Eddie said. He thought of Caskie asking questions in his soft fashion. ‘What else did Chris want to know?’

‘You and him. You’re a curious pair. Questions, questions.’

‘Curious is a cross cops carry.’

She gazed at the kitchen window for a while. Eddie saw a certain earthy quality in her that must have appealed to Jackie. The large mouth, the powerful body, the long delicate fingers; she had a mature sexuality her air of grief didn’t conceal. ‘He asked why Jackie had left Glasgow last week, and where did he go.’

‘And?’

Senga shook her head. ‘And nothing. Jackie said he had some business to attend to. I didn’t keep tabs on him. I trusted him, and he knew better than to disappoint me, believe me. I had the feeling he was going down the coast because he mentioned he was looking forward to getting some good sea air into his lungs … I drove him to Central Station, dropped him off, then picked him up the next day.’

Eddie saw a slight bafflement on her face now, the puzzlement that comes with the cold realization that everything’s changed and your world will never be the same again. The structures have been blown away and you don’t know what you’re left with except the empty road that might be the rest of your life.

He finished his coffee. He found himself gazing at her tattoo, a tiny purple-blue figure etched into flesh; a man astride a horse. She caught the line of his eye and asked, ‘Do you know who this is, Eddie? You remember your history?’

Old schoolbooks. Stories of violence and hatred. He said, ‘It’s William of Orange seated on a horse, and the date below it is July 1690. The Battle of the Boyne, if I remember correctly.’

‘Right, when King Billy defeated James, and James ran away. A big day in the history of Protestantism.’ She covered the tattoo with her hand.

Eddie asked, ‘What did Jackie think of that?’

‘He called it a disfigurement. He didn’t have a sectarian bone in his body. I had this tattoo done when I was seventeen years old and I didn’t know any better. I was brought up in a house of Loyalist maniacs who’d emigrated to Glasgow from Belfast and Derry, true blue do-or-die kill-the-Pope nutters. Catholics were beneath contempt. The Pope was the Antichrist. That was hammered into me. My dad, Willie Craig, was a high-up in the Orange Lodge and he believed the RCs were planning world domination. What chance did I have of an unbiased upbringing, eh? It’s sick, all that stuff, and it takes a long time to break free of it.’

‘But you’re free now,’ he said.

‘I’ve been free a long time, Eddie.’

He got up from the table. ‘I’ll go see how Joyce is,’ he said.

‘Wake her up. She can be a terrible sleepy-head at times.’

Senga offered her cheek to be kissed and Eddie pressed his mouth against her skin and then let himself out of the house. He walked towards Ingleby Drive. His thoughts were like flashing detour signs directing him places he didn’t want to go.